The purpose of the ZBORZBIRK project is to professionally treat, evaluate and promote cultural heritage collections created by local people.
These collections are distinct cultural treasures of the Valcanale Valley, the Resia region, the Natisone River Valley, the Torre Valley on the Italian side of the border, and the Upper Sava Valley, the Tolmin region, Kambreško, Lig and the Brda hills on the Slovenian side. There are some local museum collections among them, but mostly these are collections kept by collectors in their homes. Thus, the collectors represent the most essential element of this project, since they preserved the cultural heritage of this area in difficult times.
The items, photos and documents in these collections testify about life in the local environment, i.e. about economic activities — ranging from agriculture and livestock production to forestry, about food, traffic, trade and crafts, seasonal work and emigration, social relationships and family histories, family customs and the cycle of seasons, village festivals, music, arts, religion, etc. Almost all collections contain items from the First and Second World Wars.
Some of them have already been entered into register by the Slovenian Ethnographical Museum (in the Trieste region) and the Slovenian Ethnological Society. The latter started to make a register of collections not in museum institutions a few years ago; however, the majority of them have not yet been documented.
The preserved items, photos and documents will be documented, photographed and scanned, while the data about their production and use will be collected, and the evidence about items will be recorded and video-documented. A narrative tradition about the places the collections can be found will be brought together, while the selected narratives will be transcribed and dialectically presented.
The archival audiovisual material from the Valcanale Valley, the Resia region, the Natisone River and the Torre Valleys will be recorded and transmitted digitally. As a result, in addition to the items, stories about the items, their message and dialectological treatment will also be presented, thereby placing them in a wider cultural and historical context. They will be presented in a book guide, on CDs, posters, sign boards, in a collection of professional papers, and on a web page.
Since all cannot be documented and adequately evaluated with only one project, the project is designed so that the network of collections will remain open for further upgrading and processing. In fact, there are still so many collections in the area near the border that they have not yet all been entered into the register.
With the promotion of cultural heritage unknown until now, the project has especially encouraged the development of cultural and educational tourism. After professional treatment and evaluation, appropriately ordered and displayed collections will draw tourist in these places, while the selected premises (some of them also renovated) will be designed for setting up collections and tourist information centres (info points), connected into a digital information network.
The project, founded on the baselines of the operational programme of the cross-border cooperation, i.e. especially of social and economic analysis of tourism, culture and minorities of the project area, will contribute to obtaining a deep knowledge of cultural characteristics and language diversity in the area near the border. Last but not least, taking part in the project will also promote the cooperation of inhabitants living in the places near the border.

List of beneficiaries

The list of beneficiaries, the names of providers and their projects, and the amount of public funding for projects is being made publicly available, each year in February, in line with Article 7 of Commission Regulation (EC) No 1828/2006 and the European Transparency Initiative (COCOF April 23, 2008).